


Five Souls, One Body

by rnanqo



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate Universe - QWOP, Content Warning: Ianthe Tridentarius, Crack, Gen, My First Fanfic, Sharing a Body, The People's Tomb Fic Jam (Locked Tomb Trilogy)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-18
Updated: 2020-09-18
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:28:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26521450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rnanqo/pseuds/rnanqo
Summary: What it says on the tin. Five souls wake up in one body. Their task? Cooperate long enough to take that body one hundred meters down the track.
Comments: 22
Kudos: 73





	Five Souls, One Body

**Author's Note:**

> Recommended before reading: passing familiarity with the game QWOP

In the myriadic and first year of our lord—the ten thousand and first year of the King Undying, the Kindly Prince of Death!—the world seethed into being, hot and bright and blue. Gideon Nav shut her eyes—whoa, holy shit, wait, she had _eyes_ —and opened them again immediately.

She was standing on a rust-red track. It stretched to infinity in front of her. There was nothing else on the ground but grass and the track. Nothing else in the sky. Everything was curiously flat.

Something beeped. “You have ten minutes,” came the voice of the Necrolord Prime from thin air.

“What,” Gideon said.

“It’s only one hundred meters,” God said. “Hustle, kids!” There was another beep, and then he was gone.

Kids, plural? There was no one else h—

_Ow._

She’d tried to take a step forward, but her leg wouldn’t move. A distracted voice in the back of her mind said, _Nav?_

What the fuck, she’d been possessed.

 _No_ , came the voice again. _We’re the ones doing the possessing._ The right leg twitched forward in an approximation of a step. _I can only control this leg. You have the head?_

Gideon nodded, then thought _Yeah_ for good measure. She could feel them now, other souls jostling against her own, in the back of her mind, squishy and a little sticky, in a too-close kind of way. They were all at least vaguely familiar, and they kept shifting—were there four? Five?

 _Who’s got the other leg?_ one of them said.

 _Me_ , came an answer, and the left leg spasmed up to join the right.

 _All right,_ Gideon thought, _sound off. Gideon Nav, in the head._

_Palamedes Sextus, right leg._

_Camilla Hect, left leg._

There was the sensation of unpleasantness. The left arm twitched. _Ianthe Tridentarius, left arm_.

 _Ugh_ , Gideon thought.

 _Rude_ , Ianthe said.

 _And right arm?_ said Palamedes. _Who’s in the right arm?_

There was an infinite and awful pause.

 _Perhaps no one’s in the right arm_ , Ianthe said.

 _Oh, great, a dead right arm_ , Gideon said.

 _Well, what do we have to do?_ Palamedes said. _Just coordinate ourselves enough to travel a hundred meters? We can do that with no right arm._

 _Lucky for us, I have plenty of experience in that arena,_ Ianthe said. _Whose body even is this? Mine? Cruel joke._

Gideon looked down. Definitely wasn’t her own body. It was too short, the skin was pale and dead-looking, the color of the head on a zit, and it was dressed in a shabby knee-length shift. It didn’t feel great, either. She couldn’t move anything below the neck, and it felt heavy, stolid. Ianthe’s arm helpfully brought a lock of hair in front of the eyes—colorless, possibly blonde, possibly brown, possibly black gone grey. _I’ve never seen this body before in my life,_ Ianthe said.

Camilla and Palamedes had been whispering together and were now working in tandem, shuffling the legs together in a jerky approximation of a walk. They were moving toward the horizon, slowly but steadily, like a sulky marionette. _Could the working arm please do its job and aid in balancing us,_ Palamedes said.

Hysterical, Gideon thought. Dead, then in a shitty body, then in a shittier body where all she could do was turn her head and blink and move her tongue around like—

 _Disgusting_ , Ianthe said, and the left hand flung itself over Gideon’s mouth.

Gideon bit it.

Every single soul in the body winced: they’d all felt that. And tasted it. Nasty.

The right arm rose and batted the left hand out of Gideon’s mouth. _Nav, please_ , said a new voice, chilly and prim. _Focus_.

Harrow? Harrow! She’d know Harrow anywhere.

The left arm twitched vaguely. _Harry!_ Ianthe squealed, and the left hand flew around the body to clasp the right hand’s thumb in an uncomfortably tight embrace. The right arm wriggled away and held itself stiffly out to the side, as far from the right as possible. This flurry of activity overbalanced the body in a dangerous way. The legs jerked, trying to compensate. Everyone started yelling at once, to coordinate.

_Left leg left leg go forward—no, forward!_

_Arms! Arms would you collect yourselves—_

_Whoever’s projecting such ancient and general disgust, fucking stop it, I’m trying to focus—_

_THAT’S NOT WHAT FEET DO—_

But it was all to no use, as the body teetered, windmilled, and finally collapsed into the splits on the track.

There was a stunned moment of silence and stillness.

 _Well, this isn't ideal_ , said Camilla.

 _Ouch_ , Ianthe said, though it didn’t actually hurt, being in the splits. The body was weirdly pliant— _but also incredibly hard to control_ , added Palamedes, _so thanks, everyone, for your help. Arms, could you push us up—_

 _No,_ Harrow said. The right arm had gone straight up in the air, and the hand drooped in clearly insulted fashion.

 _I won’t touch you again_ , Ianthe said, wheedling.

 _If you do I will rip you off this body,_ Gideon said. _With my teeth_.

A leg jerked. There was a flicker of inspiration from Camilla. _Warden, if you—_

 _On it_ , said Palamedes, and the two legs, still in the splits, began to drag the body forward along the track. The front leg bent and pulled; the back leg pushed. It looked like a disaster, but at least they were moving, with a horrible rocking motion that was making the body queasy.

 _There isn’t a more elegant solution?_ Harrow said.

A flicker of annoyance from Ianthe. _You won’t help us up, so._

 _We’re all in the same boat,_ Gideon said. _Body_ , she added.

 _Stop chattering,_ Palamedes said. _This takes a huge amount of focus_.

The body hurgled along the track, making small but measurable progress. The arm Ianthe controlled was slapping impatiently at the ground, doing nothing to help. Harrow’s remained fastidiously up in the air. The legs were gathering energy from somewhere, so now instead of a pushing and pulling, they were bouncing along the track, still in the splits. Gideon laughed at it at first, because it looked singularly ridiculous, but it also didn’t change. It took forever. And forever. And forever.

 _What do you guys think happens when we get to the end,_ she said eventually, because they were making forward progress with all the speed of an anemic worm.

 _I hope it involves never sharing a body with any of you again,_ Palamedes said. _Someone is slimy and I can’t tell who._

Ianthe said, _Sharing a body with four other people is something that can actually be so personal_.

 _Too personal_ , Harrow said.

Camilla kept quiet, but her bone-deep sense of being absolutely and fatally done with this shit spread throughout the whole shared body.

A painted white line appeared on the horizon, not far off. _The finish line!_ Gideon said, and a spike of excitement went through everyone’s soul. The arm that had been up in the air dropped abruptly to the side, knocking off the body’s center of balance. They wobbled, and landed with little panache on Gideon's face. The track smelled like sweat.

 _Harrow?_ Gideon said. _You good? Stay with us._

Harrow sounded groggy. _I’m here._

 _CRAWL!_ Camilla roared, which frightened everyone into cooperation. The arms reached forward as one. The legs pushed the body up. With one singular superhuman effort, they stumble-scramble-flew over the finish line, and the body crashed back into the track, rubbery and hurty and possibly dead.

 _No more, please_ , groaned Palamedes.

 _Are we done?_ Ianthe said.

Gideon cleared the body's throat and called up to the flat sky. "We did it! It's done!"

There was a beep, and then God spoke. “Sorry, I’ve been multitasking. Your ten minutes were up a while ago. I didn’t see all of it, but I did catch the funny parts.” There was a crunch, as of someone taking a bite of a biscuit, and then an uncomfortably detailed chew-and-swallow noise. “Gotta say, it’s been centuries since I’ve seen a group go for the splits strategy, and it’s my personal favorite.”

“Uh,” Gideon said. "There's strategy to this?"

"Oh yes," God said sadly. "It's an ancient game. Few have ever mastered it. Few have even gotten to the end.”

“But we did it?”

“Yes,” said God, “and I’m very proud.”

**Author's Note:**

> This AU is entirely the fault of The People's Tomb discord.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Five Souls, One Body](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29246049) by [Shmaylor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shmaylor/pseuds/Shmaylor)




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